'If You Can Keep It': The Shadow Of Political Violence

0:28You're listening to the 1A Podcast. year old Kirk died after he was shot at an event at Utah Valley University. He was speaking to a large crowd at an outdoor prove me wrong debate where he invited students to challenge his political and cultural views. At a press conference on Friday, Utah's Republican Governor Spencer Cox asked Americans to consider what happens from here, an escalation or an off ramp. Here's a bit of what he said. I absolutely believe that this is a watershed in American history. Yes. The question is what kind of watershed? And that chapter remains to be written. Is this the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter in our history?

1:08The killing of Charlie Kirk is the latest in a spate of rising political violence across the country. A Minnesota state legislator and her spouse were murdered in their home in June. The Pennsylvania governor's house was set on fire in April. Last year on the campaign trail, Trump faced two assassination attempts, and experts who study political violence say the frequency and seriousness is increasing significantly. So how did we get here, and can we pull back? That's what we get into today after this short break. Stay with us.

1:44Back now to our conversation about political violence. And before we meet our guests, Todd, I want to start with you. We're in this constant swirl of information, misinformation, disinformation from the time of Charlie Kirk's killing right up to this moment right now. What do we actually know? What we actually know, the suspect grew up in southwest Utah in this town of Washington right in the southwest corner of the state, was an excellent student by all accounts, grew up in a Republican household, and was most recently going back to trade school to become an electrician. There's a couple of other things we know.

2:20He may have been in a relationship with somebody who might have been a partner or a roommate. That's still unclear. The police are talking to that person. Now, people want to understand motive here. That's what a lot of this is about. A lot of media outlets and political actors are on the hunt, I think, especially for a partisan motive, right? That's where a lot of this gets misleading now. Was he somebody on the left? Was he somebody on the right? Now, it's widely reported, and here's another thing that we know, that Robinson recently criticized Charlie Kirk around his family. That fact alone actually doesn't explain much about his views as we're going to talk about.

2:58What we're discovering more and more is that the evidence potentially pointing instead of to directly partisan motives might be pointing to a youth culture that lives online on message boards, Discord servers. Some of it has a home in video games. Some of it does not. It's murky and essentially unknown to outsiders by design. And it's a world filled with memes, inside jokes, ironies wrapped in more ironies, really for the in-group. It's not meant to be understood by outsiders. And I'm going to give you just one example from what we do know to sort of set this up. One of the shell casings that were found at the scene had etched in it the message, hey, fascist, catch.

3:46Now, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, said that that message speaks for itself. In fact, that message does not speak for itself because in many of these communities, and again, we're just sort of looking at a world that maybe we don't understand well. In many of these communities, a message like that is often trafficked both in left-wing circles and in right-wing circles, but maybe in circles where those designations don't mean much. And it's just the irony of those messages that are for the in-group. They know that the outside world is attached to that politics, but they're really not. So we're pointing to a world as hard as it is to understand.

4:23It's really more about the nihilism of extremism and the irony of it and not about political ideology itself. And many experts now, and I think we're going to talk about it, are pointing to this event and many other events in recent history, other shootings that may point to this type of dynamic. And we should be clear that in the aftermath of shootings, acts of violence, there is often this rush to assign political motivations for the actions of that person. President Donald Trump said this on Fox and Friends on Friday in a conversation with the hosts. I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less.

5:01The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. Worried about the border. They're saying, we don't want these people coming in. We don't want you burning our shopping centers. We don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem. Now let's meet our guests. Garrett Grath is an author, historian, and host of the Long Shadow podcast. It's about pivotal moments in U.S. history. Garrett, welcome back to the program. Thanks so much for chatting, Jen. And Cynthia Miller-Idris. She's the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.

5:40It's also known as Peril. And she's the author of the new book, Man Up, The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism. It comes out tomorrow. Cynthia, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Garrett, as we heard, the motives for this shooting are unclear. But what does the response to this killing tell us about the state of the polarization of our country right now? I think actually this is a really important point to start with, which is the extent to which we saw people begin to weaponize Charlie Kirk's shooting in the hours after Wednesday's shooting, even before a shooter was actually identified and even in the days since before we understand what the motive is.

6:32And that this is something that people, I would argue sort of mostly bad faith actors who come from this right wing influencer community, mostly online, have been trying to fit into a pre-existing narrative that is useful to them for both political and profit motivated reasons. and that there is, in fact, a lot of money being made by the most outrageous voices in this space. And so there's a lot of motivation at these major inflection points to be among those most outrageous voices in order to sort of attract and build and be able to monetize the audience that those outrageous statements attract.

7:28Well, political violence is as old as the country itself. I mean, the U.S. was founded after the Revolutionary War. Political violence was ripe before Civil War in 1861. The 1960s were marred with upheaval and discord and division. In just five years, we saw the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and in 1968, the back-to-back assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. As a historian, Garrett, how does this moment in the country's history compare? I think what we are seeing is something that's a little bit different. And Todd, I think, began to hint at this as he was talking about this online culture where we are used to thinking about political violence on a left-to-right spectrum.

8:21That we are trying, I think, to think about this moment in the red-blue spectrum that we deal with politics offline in an electoral sense. And this is something that is a little bit different and distinct, where you have more of this coming from an online, mostly male, heavily white, online gaming community, where a lot of these people are emerging from and listening to voices in what's known as the manosphere online. that are arranged not really in a traditional left, right, red, blue spectrum, but in a spectrum that's more sort of anti-institution, anti-centers of power, anti-authority, up to, as Todd said, sort of a nihilistic sense.

9:27and it I think should say something to us that at least based on what we know right now,

9:39the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler last summer, this shooting of Charlie Kirk, I would also actually put in this same category the assassination of the UnitedHealth CEO last year on the street of New York, that we are seeing these high-profile acts of violence come from people who have very muddled political backgrounds and ideologies. Cynthia, you've been studying political violence and researching solutions for a long time. As we said earlier, people tend to rush for an ideological motive in the aftermath of something like this. But you say that may not be the best approach.

10:20Why? Well, first of all, I think rushing for an explanation can do a couple of things. One, it can generate backlash and, you know, exacerbate kind of a tinderbox effect that leads to people, if they've jumped to conclusions, to more violence. And so we want to de-escalate that wherever possible and stop any possible backfire, you know, backlash effect that happens when people think they know what the motivation is, when it isn't yet clear. And the other thing is that increasingly we're seeing in very frustrating ways, I think, to people who want ideological clear explanations, a lot of shootings, particularly from young people, come through in a way that have very muddled or blurry ideology that pick and choose pieces of ideological fragments that really show a ton of immersion in hateful online spaces, but don't always make a clear link to the motive of those targets.

11:17And so we saw that in Uvalde, Texas. We saw that in Highland Park. We've seen that recently in Minnesota in the most recent school shooting. So these types of things where you have lots of clues that people have been incubating in terrible online spaces, but the motive doesn't ever become linked to those terrible online spaces. And we don't know if that's what's happening here, but it can be very frustrating for people. Cynthia, does that explain when you look at the aftermath of the targeting of President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Immediately after that, and I suppose it's understandable, he's a former president and future president of the United States.

11:53Everybody rushed for those ideological motives. Then that story disappeared. The story of the motives disappeared, and it seems like it disappeared in retrospect because there wasn't one. There wasn't an ideological motive. It was something else, and the interest in that has kind of gone away. Yeah, so many recent shootings, including that one, have had no clear motive attached. And that's very frustrating to people. People really want a clear explanation. It's also one of the reasons why people are susceptible to conspiracy theories, because they want something to explain something in the world that they don't understand, whether it's the assassination of JFK or a virus that's invisible and harming their families.

12:37And so people look for explanations that offer them something that is black and white and clear ideological boundaries around something that is far left or far right offers that to people, even if it's not there. And so, yes, I think those explanations drop off even when people have reached for them very quickly for political opportunism or for other reasons because they want to feel that they understand what's happened. We got this question from one of you, Anthony, who asks, what if the motive is not primarily ideological? What if it has more to do with celebrity or infamy? Does our focus on ideology have more to do with media than the shooter?

13:18And media is a big umbrella these days that can include anything from traditional outlets to the social media sphere, which is increasing by the moment, it seems. Cynthia? Yes, I mean, I think, you know, this is where one of the things, and we heard at the beginning of this segment, the listener talking about the legitimation of political violence. I would say we've absolutely seen the legitimation of violence or a normalization of it from political leaders, but also on social media from ordinary people and the left and the right. And so you see the celebrations in the wake of the assassination of the United Healthcare Exec and some of the you reap what you sow language in this recent shooting and also after President Trump's assassination attempts.

14:05And so I think one of the things we see is that there's a propensity to violence that can not have ideological boundaries, but that is still rooted in a normalization and a legitimation of violence as a solution of some way or as a path to infamy or to recognition. And that can be problematic. Garrett, some of the limited amount that we do know here, as we said, were etched on shell casings, opaque cryptic messages, which brings us back to gun violence and the part of this that Americans are all too familiar with. We got this email from Donovan who says, please talk about the overlap and the difference between political violence and gun violence.

14:46So What are those differences and where is the overlap here? One of the things we have seen in really horrific ways over the last decade is the way that a lot of the, and I'm not saying that this is necessarily something that is linked to Charlie Kirk's shooting, but a trend that we have seen across a lot of these mass shootings and high-profile shootings over the last decade is that they are sort of all in conversation with one another. That sort of starting with the massacre in 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand, that you have seen this sort of pattern of shooters trying to live stream their shootings, posting manifestos.

15:34This carving messages on bullets is something that we have sort of begun to see more regularly in these high-profile shootings. And I think one of the things, to build on what Cynthia was just saying about sort of the muddled ideologies and sort of the unfortunate idea that this is a path to infamy among sort of a certain subset of, again, mostly young white males who see this as something that they are open to doing, is that because there is this tragic backdrop of sort of normalized shootings in America, workplace shootings, school shootings, that there has been this almost one-upmanship of, you know, massacres have to be bigger, they have to be more spectacular, They have to be live streamed online in order to get the type of media attention and internet infamy that they used to.

16:43Remember last Wednesday, the same day that Charlie Kirk was shot, there was another school shooting in the same county in Colorado that the Columbine shooting first took place. and it was similarly by someone with apparently, as far as we can tell, very vile anti-Semitic views and it just sort of didn't get any real attention at all nationally. Some of that has to do with obviously the happening in the shadow of the Charlie Kirk shooting. But I think one of the things that I really worry about as someone who studies and writes on this is that there is a sort of lesson taking place right now online that these high-profile political assassinations are sort of the new school shooting if you are someone who is looking to make the biggest splash that you can.

17:44Back with more from our guests and from you in just a moment.

17:52We got this message from Aaron who says, Something I really struggle with is that this shooting, which was senseless and tragic, targeted someone who shrugged off gun-related deaths and spoke against empathy, among other polarizing hateful viewpoints. It makes it hard to know how to speak about this situation and possible future solutions in an honest way that is still sensitive of the loss of life. And Cynthia, I think this is a good time to turn to what a better policy response would be to this uptick we're seeing in political violence. Yeah, well, one of the policy solutions that we urge, including in education settings, in universities, in schools, but also on the soccer field or across the dinner table, is when you hear someone say something, as we have heard on college campuses increasingly, like there is no political solution to whether that's climate change or immigration, that that's a moment to intervene, right?

18:49that there's a cultural zeitgeist that now has something like 50 % or more of Gen Z youth feeling like violence is acceptable under some circumstances to achieve a political aim. And I think we have to turn that tide. And so when you're talking about how do you convince people that political solutions can be had without violence, one of the things we need is for political leaders to model that, first of all. And we also need to intervene when young people think, Like, you know, it hasn't worked so far, so there's no other option than violent revolution or there's no other option than drawing attention with assassination, even if, you know, in the end, this particular case may not be ideologically motivated, but sort of more mass shooter fandom or infamy motivated.

19:36Either way, violence has to be educationally steered away from as part of what we all do in our prevention efforts. Does that approach align with the types of investment we're actually seeing from our government institutions? Not now, not at all. And even under the previous administration, there were very thin investments. So when you look at something like January 6th, we got something like$200 million in additional funding for security for one building, the U.S. Capitol, in the wake of that event. and we doubled our entire federal government's funding for prevention from 10 million to 20 million, all of which is now gone, right?

20:19And so we fund almost nothing on the prevention side. When you look at that in comparison to Germany, where I spent the first 15 years of my career, it's billions and billions of euro, 95 % of which goes to primary prevention, education, civic and media literacy, inclusive democracy work to tamp down the likelihood. No, they had a terrible, terrible tragedy last century that led them to make those investments as part of their efforts to ensure that democracy continues. I hope that we never have to get to that point before we start thinking about those investments. We have models. So it seems then like democratic institutions right now, at least in this country, are not working to meet the demands of the population of this moment as people are turning to political violence more frequently.

21:10Garrett, have we seen Democrats or Republican lawmakers, others in positions of power, ready to publicly grapple with their role in turning down the political temperature? certainly not in the week uh or so slightly less than a week since the charlie kirk shooting um you know one of the episodes that i have talked a lot about in the last couple of days from history is the speech that rfk gave in indianapolis uh the night that martin luther king was shot this is a a very famous moment in this sort of history of political violence where he was attending a political rally. Remember, this is spring of 1968 as he is running for the presidential nomination.

22:04And he shows up for this rally in Indianapolis the night that Martin Luther King has been shot and killed. And he has to break that news to the crowd. And he gives this incredible speech, really saying how he understands the moment and how angry it will make people and how much it will inflame tensions, but that he says that it is necessary for the country to make the effort like Martin Luther King did to understand and comprehend and replace that violence and bloodshed with compassion and love and that that is something that we have not seen a message from our national leaders, particularly President Trump and other leaders in the Republican Party since last Wednesday, who have been actually doing what they can to turn the temperature up.

23:00We're going to talk about what political violence does to the health of our democratic public spaces. But what about the effect of political violence to the health of our own bodies, our feelings of safety, our desire to engage with the democratic process at all? For that, let's bring in Kate Woodson. She's a journalist and the founder of the Invisible Threads Project. That's a media and leadership lab exploring the link between mental health and democracy. Kate, welcome back. Thank you. Now, Kate, the shooting of Charlie Kirk went viral on social media. For those who want it to, it was easy to see.

23:33Some people saw it unintentionally as it autoplayed on their social media feeds. The video is extremely graphic, and in it we witness a violent death. What are the impacts of seeing this kind of violence on individuals? Well, one thing that is really important to recognize is that amid all of the differences in divisions that we have, what we all have in common is our nervous system. And our nervous system is our command and control center that is trying to keep us safe. And so it is monitoring inputs from around the world around us and inside of us. And when we see violence like that, what happens is that our nervous system tells us that there is danger, even if it is not happening to us.

24:18So our heart can increase. Our breathing can increase. Our muscles can tense. Our pupils can, you know, narrow in on potential dangers around us. And so essentially, we become more activated and we transition from potentially a social, open, engaged state where you are more relaxed and empathetic and connected to a more defensive state where you are scanning for danger. You might be more irritable. You might be more evasive. You might even be shut down. And so physically, what I think a lot of people experienced was extreme activation. and then if they were unable to kind of come down or ground and say, I am safe in this moment, you can become dysregulated.

25:07And we have a situation right now with the constant input of violent images, whether it is from Gaza or gun violence or anything else that is around us, whether in violent images, violent rhetoric, it is all activating our nervous system. Well, I want to circle in on that rhetoric piece for a moment Because even if you didn't watch the video, if you were able to avoid it, could reading the responses to the violence trigger a similar or the same response? Absolutely. I mean, the rhetoric right now is signaling that we are not safe. You know, we're in Washington, D.C. right now, and President Trump deployed the National Guard ostensibly, he says, to keep us safe.

25:54But that deployment of forces has a dysregulating effect on many people in the city. And so it is the inputs that are telling your nervous system, am I safe enough to be connected to the people around me? Am I safe enough to open up? And the language and signals that are coming is that no, we are not safe to open up and connect with others. How can we disrupt that reactivity and reset? Is it possible in this environment? Absolutely. You know, this is a situation where you need to look at your sphere of influence. And right now, the system is very dysregulated. The nervous system of democracy is dysregulated.

26:38So let's go inward to ourselves. And if you are feeling stressed, first of all, notice the stress. You have to begin to notice what is your state of stress and relaxation. And then you need to take a pause and look around, find something that you feel connected to, whether it is a book, a cat, a rock. You know, really just disrupt the dysregulating, activating inputs that you have and focus on something that is going to ground you. Then you can expand from there. It seems really simple, but what we have is these cycles of reactivity because people are not taking a breath. Well, it's easy to see how that personal dysregulation, that stress, those inputs can discourage people from wanting to participate in the public sphere, which at its base is how our democracy functions.

27:34People going out in public to protest or talk, even to go online and have real discussions, not sniping. So let's go back to this idea of civic spaces and public engagement in light of what you just described and what so many of us are going through in the aftermath of seeing all of all of this terribleness on our laptops, on our phones, on television and even in our conversations. Here's Senator Bernie Sanders last week. A free and democratic society depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views.

28:18The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out public life and make people afraid of participating. Cynthia, given what we just heard, how do you think this affects our desire, our ability, and the democracy's ability to function now? What's the knock-on effect here? Well, one of the things that I have talked to a lot of high school students about over the last several months is what some of them volunteered to me shortly after February 26th when I was in a high school classroom. And they said, oh, you're talking, when I was talking about algorithms, you're talking about what happened on February 26th, for example.

29:02And I said, what happened on February 26th? Because I wasn't even aware yet. None of the adults were in the room. all the kids knew that their InstaRails had been flooded that day for about 24 hours with horrific gore and violent content because of an error in the algorithm that Meta then apologized for on February 27th, which barely made the news. And I asked them, you know, among other things, like, so one of the teachers said something like, are you telling me like you saw a live murder over lunch on your phone and then you had to go take a math test? And they said, yeah, that's what we did.

29:36And so then the whole conversation shifted to how they handle that kind of violent content showing up unexpectedly on their feeds. And what they say is it makes them numb or apathetic. None of them reported it. None of them told an adult. And I subsequently have asked every high school group I've been with since and my college students and across all of the places I've been in the last six months, I only had two kids say they told an adult. One told a trusted mentor, they said, and one told an older brother. neither one of them reported it to the app or to the platform. And so I think we have to really think a lot about the impacts of not just single instances of violence, but this constant stream of unexpected gore that comes and how it desensitizes, it normalizes, and it makes kids in particular quite numb, in addition to probably producing PTSD symptoms like we heard about, as we know happened when kids accidentally saw 9-11 jumpers or beheading videos from ISIS.